Library Technology

Developing technologies to support libraries.

friendfeed

http://friendfeed.com

FriendFeed (ff) aggregates all of the RSS feed that you generate through the course of time into one place (twitter, blogs, netflix, and many others)

Once you subscribe to other user’s friendfeed accounts you can start viewing the accumulation of their life online.

You have the ability to comment on anyone’s shared item. If you liked what they have to say then you can very simply indicate this.

Taking any action on a shared item pushes that item back to the top of a shared reverse chronological stream of everyone’s life.

Twitter Posts (tweets) will often start out in the twitter realm as simple posts only to become very involved conversation in friendfeed.

You can learn a lot by listening and sharing, and it also helps you stay in touch with friends and colleagues around the world.

updates

why the lack of posting?

Well I have never been good at keeping up to date. I usually do this in bursts an then realize I should be doing something else.

Tomorrow is my first Systems meeting. Hoping to transition into my new job within the next two months. For now I’ll keep Acquisitions on track.

Twitter

Testing out twitter.

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!”

I think you really need to figure out which companion tools to use in order to derive benefit from this resource.

Examples:

cell phone texting
twhirl: “twhirl is a desktop twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform.
IM
twitkit etc…

You also have to figure out some of the addons

@username =public replies to your followers/followed
#hashtags - a companion site that enables tagging of your tweets (I haven’t quite gotten it to work yet)

ASP.NET and C#

Well, time to learn 2 new languages or “web development technologies

I want to start building a database at work so I must conform to company policy. If nothing else this gives me an opportunity to learn more so it’s not a bad thing.

I just loko forward to getting this project of the ground.

sql - php

I have made some pretty good progress using PHP to access and SQL database. So far i have made a query and returned a list of results. This was done by combining SQL, PHP, and HTML syntax.



For now it is only on my local machine so I don’t have any examples yet.





powered by performancing firefox

SQL Level 2

I am in my second day long session to learn SQL.

The theory is that once I have taken all the requisite courses I will be taught the intricacies of Aleph and then I will be let loose to improve our situation.

Google Toolbar 3

Trying out the bnew Google Toolbar.

“The new version of Google Toolbar for Firefox adds the features that were available only in the IE toolbar and a special bonus.”
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/12/google-toolbar-3-for-firefox.html

Already I notice that it doesn’t automatically copy the text I am highlighting on a page.

Stephen Abram (bloglines)

Props to “Stephen Abram MLS —Vice President Innovations, SirsiDynix” for his mentions of bloglines all throughout this podcast:





“25 Technologies in 50 Minutes



Nov 14, 2006 | 01:00:00



Lots of technologies are due consideration for our library portals. Which would be on your top 25 list? We can’t do it all at once but we should be trying more than a few out to learn about them. Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix’s Vice President of Innovation lists a technology application every 120 seconds in this roller coaster ride of what’s out there in LibraryLand and which one’s are worth playing with and seeing if they’ll be useful to your library and your community of users. Join us for the cook’s tour of what’s in the front of the pack for the 2.0 Community Portal. Maybe I’ll use an egg timer dinger for every 2 minutes!



More Info | Listen Now | Podcast”

http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.com/archive.php

Charleston Acquisitions Conference 2006 XVI Friday Concurrent 1: Scatter and Decay E-journal usage patterns

Scatter and Decay E-journal usage patterns

Carol Tanopir

Abundant Data – too much?

Easy access to use of ejournal collections
 
There is a need to gather more data, because as good as it is now we have to gather info from users to find out what they use and why and what other things they use (web, subject repositories) to get a fuller picture.

Max Data funded by ilms funded to get data about data about selected libraries and look at whole picture.
They want to look at the story behind the data, what can we conclude with confidence about the different methods of data collection.

Ultimate outcome will be a cost benefit model for the different methods of data collection. What is worthwhile to use for the different things you want to find.

Goals to help libraries make the best use of data, they are sharing what they have collected today.

3 teams
Dave Norris London looking at deep log data, logs from all of Ohio link libraries, they isolated 4 libraries that they also surveyed.
1    Research intensive, 1 research extensive and 2 masters heavy.

Log analysis of ejournal usage only

With survey you can better identify survey base, you can separate out by rank and degree.

Negative thing about surveys is that it is self reported, but you can find out why they did things and what the values

Gail from Tennessee survey reports

 2 findings for today: scatter and decay. Looking at how you measure use in libraries.

Scatter: relative dispersion of points on a graph in respect to a mean value, (used loosely today) want to look at how reading varies by subject discipline.

Looked at how many journals used in last month multiplied it by 12 to get a year.

Medical and health students and faculty have read many more articles 434 for faculty and 222 students, many more than other disciplines. Variation in number of articles or reading done found.

Downloads by subject in Ohio University, found by logs
Medical journals first followed by other sciences. Looked at subject are of journal to come up with this distribution.

Used counter data and combined it to come up with a list of titles and used info from link resolver to come up with subject headings. Medicine did not come out on top this way. Medical school located in Memphis, and they use separate databases from Knoxville location, this would account for the discrepancy.

The Arts/humanities section looks high because link resolver put new/fashion entertainment into that category.

File had 17,000 unique titles. Log report had 7,000.

In addition to counter reports they also had other info from aggregators which came through here.

Pointed out that some titles had multiple subjects.

Couple titles in top 20 use, billboard and rolling stone, history of rock class is very popular there (Tenn.)

You have to look behind stats to find out where information is coming from. In the future it would be good to pull out scholarly titles and look at the distribution.

David looked at downloads by subject staff and faculty vs. student use.

Student use is much higher to online articles. This might be because Faculty has other sources for info, personal sub-reading rooms-colleagues.

Survey: how many minutes did you spend on the last article you read. Found that engineers spent twice as much time on medical articles.

Found medical articles are more widely read but they have been read through more quickly.

Average number of seconds of view per article was gleaned from the log data.

135 seconds time read by sciences viewers. Assumed that article is scanned over and decision is made to print or download.

Looking at the Counter data to see the entire collection. Found that 10% of titles counted for about 80% of use.

Decided to look at titles alone, and combined data on like titles, wasn’t fun matching on titles or unstandard ISSN. Ended up with 17000 titles and 11.5% counted for 80% of usage.

Highest use titles: science with over 8000 downloads. Nature 4,000, Tetrahedron, AMS archives (older chem. Data), USA today

Data from Ohio link looks somewhat different because they were looking at more scholarly titles (presumably)

–David –
Decay: process of gradually becoming inferior, gradual decrease. Or reading fails by age of articles

Did a lot of work on all 6000 Ohio link titles, good background on contextual use. There has been an increase in use of older material, because it is much more visible than it previously was.

Evidence shows that people who use search engines find older material.

Decay of article readings.
Carol asked people about when the last article they read was.

Looking at downloads

Looking at how data is triangulated and what does it mean?

Citation: Journal of the American society for

When we actually look at dowloads. We get a different picture

Conclusion:
No one perfect method for data collection. Need to look at sub discipline of reader and for items. Found so far that student assignments can lead to skewed data.
 
When looking at stories behind data there is a big difference based on sub discipline. Caution about log data.

Student reader skewed towards students, because faculty has other way to get info

We need to examine what are value is compared to our costs.

They will continue to look at possibilities for log collection. More work the more cost and more of your time is used.

The more effort you put in the greater story.

Charleston Acquitisions conference 2006 Thursday SEssion 2

After the Dinosaur Killer: Adaptation and Survival

Michael Pelikan - Information Sciences and Technology Librarian, Penn University

This is a Recap of a talk from 3 years ago

Standards

Elements

Vocabulary

DRM-predicted that it would be solved at network level

10 years ago there was a forecast by F.W. Lancaster that

Libraries will be seen as a drain on the academic community

Who is the dinosaur?

Unintended consequences – king kong vs dino (world view of both similar)

Universities will bypass traditional publishing model.

Business model gives publishers money to print

Patron’s worldview

World is in their hand=ambient findability

Searchable information where they need it

Problem-you can only search for words/not ideas

Academon – pays for student papers and sells them, giving royalties back to the author.

CiteSeer- (experimental project)

Google Scholar inspired by citeseer

Their acquisition of jotspot (wiki hosting) building of communties shows beginning of business model totally supported by advertising.

Most valuable information on the web today=your clicks (click forensics—traffic)

Click throughs and web logs gives you 100% sample rate that is accessible through machine analysis.

Nemesis (book) describes the problem with inherited knowledge, and not creating new ideas (instead just re-harvesting previously created ideas.)